Kristy Arnett interviewed Canadian poker pro Jason Lavallee in 2013 for PokerNews (click here for full audio interview.) In the audio interview, he talked about a queen-high call-down he made in a European Poker Tour event. His opponent's bet-timing played a role in his decision. Basically, he thought that an immediate bet meant that her range was polarized, because most players don't know what to ...
Jonathan Little: Paying attention to opponent behavior
The following is a guest blog post from Jonathan Little. Little is a two-time WPT champion with over $5,000,000 in career earnings. He is the owner of the training site FloatTheTurn.com and is the author of numerous best-selling poker books. You can follow him on twitter @JonathanLittle. Jonathan is running a series of live seminars during the 2014 WSOP with poker tells author Zachary Elwood. ...
Poker trip to Los Angeles, observing verbal behavior
I spent a week in L.A. at the end of February, playing poker and appearing in a couple episodes of the live-streaming poker show Live at the Bike. I played primarily $5-5 and $5-10 NLHE cash games. I haven’t played much at all in the last few years, so it was an interesting and educational trip, getting back into playing all the time and seeing how people were playing at these stakes. I’d also ...
Reading tells in Cards Against Humanity & Apples To Apples
Apples To Apples and Cards Against Humanity are similar games. Apples To Apples is a popular G-rated party game. Cards Against Humanity is like its R-rated cousin; exactly similar in play but with much darker, twisted content. These games are not seriously played and are usually just an excuse for the players to laugh at the humorous juxtaposition of ideas. Even though these games are not ...
A Queen-high call down involving immediate bets from an opponent
I saw this PokerNews story where Kristy Arnett interviewed Jason Lavallee, the winner of this year's PokerStars European Poker Tour London High Roller, about a Queen high call-down he made on the final table of that tournament. Here's the story: http://www.pokernews.com/strategy/strategy-with-kristy-jason-lavallee-discusses-a-queen-high-c-16743.htm ...
Analysis of Sylvain Loosli’s potential poker tells in 2013 WSOP Main Event
In this post, I’m going to describe my analysis of Sylvain Loosli that I did prior to and during the 2013 WSOP Main Event final table. I had been hired by Amir Lehavot to analyze his opponents and himself for possible behavioral leaks. The point of this post is not just to talk about how I went about trying to find patterns in Loosli and what those patterns may have been, it’s also to talk about ...
Analyzing poker tells for Amir Lehavot at the 2013 WSOP Main Event
A couple weeks before the WSOP Main Event final table, I got an email from Amir Lehavot (founder of PokerWit.com and 3rd in this year's WSOP ME), asking if I’d be interested in helping him prepare for the final table. After discussing what I might be able to do to help him, and making sure we had similar expectations, I agreed. My role was to analyze existing footage of his opponents for possible ...
Reading Poker Tells book mentioned in 2013 WSOP
This year, during the World Series of Poker Main Event broadcast, my book Reading Poker Tells got a shout-out from Norman Chad. Here's the clip; go to the 1hr1m point if it doesn't automatically take you there. I'd sent a copy of Reading Poker Tells to Norman a few months ago, but I've sent out so many books over the past year to people (roughly $4,000 worth!) and haven't heard back from ...
Working on a new poker tells book
I'm working full-time on another poker tells book. The book will be called Verbal Poker Tells and will focus specifically on all things verbal at the poker table: the things people say and how they say them. It will use a lot of examples from actual hands, both televised and hands played by me and others. I've been collecting a fairly large database of verbal patterns and will use this database to ...
Guest blog post from poker player Daniel Steinberg
I received an interesting email from Daniel Steinberg, who's an ex-poker-pro with some very good online and live results. He’s obviously got a lot of poker experience, so his opinions are worth listening to. I've included some of my responses to him in-line with his email. ...
More on immediate calls (snap-calls) in No Limit Hold’em
In my previous blog post I talked about what immediate calls (snap-calls) of significant turn bets in NLHE might mean. Some responses let me know that I hadn’t made it clear that I was just talking about significant turn bets, as opposed to flop bets, so I wanted to reiterate that. I think some of what I said can apply to flop bets, but flop bets and calls are usually not as meaningful, just ...
A Snap-Call Theory
The last post I wrote talked about immediate calls and what they might mean. (I called them “quick calls” but I should say “immediate calls” or "snap calls" because “quick” could be interpreted as someone moving their bet in with a quick motion.) I had talked in my book about quick calls for a short bit, but I’ve never felt happy with that section, because I felt there was much more to say on it. ...
Poker tells at live $1-2 no-limit
Update: Did you know I have a poker tells video series? Check it out here. In the past couple of weeks (November 2012), I played a few sessions of live $1-2 NLHE with the purpose of studying what poker tell information was the most important and relevant. It’d been a while since I played $1-2 (haven't been playing much at all lately with the exception of some $2-5 and the occasional $100+ ...
Length of time looking at hole cards: a really useful heads-up poker tell
I got heads-up in a NLHE tournament the other night and noticed that my opponent had a very common poker tell: when his hole cards were weak, he'd stare at them for a couple seconds on his initial look at them. This can be a useful tell at a full table, but I've found it's especially common when in a short-handed or heads-up situation. Instead of posting this story here, I got permission from ...
Studying Guy Laliberte’s poker tells, Part 2
In my last post I talked about some possible poker tells Guy Laliberte might have had during the One Drop. None of it was very conclusive, just because there were so few hands involving Guy, and only one where he made a significant bluff. In this post I wanted to look back at some old hands from a few years ago, to see if we could spot some of the same behavior. To summarize my last post, the ...
One Drop Tournament: Guy Laliberte’s poker tells
I spent the last couple days studying footage of Guy Laliberte playing poker. I started out studying the One Drop $1 million buy-in tournament final table footage, with the goal of picking up significant patterns Guy might have in significant hands. There were quite a few hands where Guy had strong hands and obviously wanted action. The problem was that there was really only one significant bluff ...
Chris Moneymaker getting a live read on Chris Oliver
I've been too busy to do many interesting blog posts lately, but I plan on doing some more in-depth televised poker analysis soon, on the level of what I did with the Pius Heinz WSOP 2011 footage. For now, I'll just post this video where it seems that Chris Moneymaker has a really good live read on his opponent Chris Oliver. This isn't just an interpretation; Moneymaker actually tells his "mental ...
Phil Ivey talks about poker tells
Phil Ivey recently sat for an interview (which is a rare thing) conducted by Nolan Dalla. Although it was just a few soft-ball questions (no mention of Full Tilt Poker stuff), it still gives a very interesting glimpse into Ivey's mind, in my opinion. He also talks a little bit about poker tells. ...
Reading Poker Tells e-book now available
I've finally got the Reading Poker Tells e-book up for sale here. I've got it available as a zipped file that includes all three major formats: PDF, EPUB, and MOBI. This is what I've seen several other sites do. I've been told it offers the most convenient way for people to view the e-book on any e-reader or device they may have, whether it's the Kindle, the iPad, the Nook, or whatever else ...
I’m interviewed on Badugi Allstars poker podcast
The boys at Badugi Allstars interviewed me on their poker podcast. Talk included: Why I wrote the book What makes my book different from other poker tells books The importance of correlating tells with specific situations Some discussion on the common tell of defensive chip handling Dissing Joe Navarro and Mike Caro (respectfully) Penis-shaped doughnuts (it's a Portland, Oregon ...
More poker tells in Rounders (besides KGB’s Oreo)
Hi, I'm Zach Elwood, the author of the book Verbal Poker Tells (amongst other poker tells projects). This is my blog. My email acquaintance Michael Blinder recently wrote to point out something very awesome in the movie Rounders. Both Teddy KGB and Mike McDermott (Matt Damon’s character) exhibit a few poker tells besides the infamous Oreo cookie one. Both of them exhibit a kind of poker tell I ...
Trying to influence villain to call or fold (false tells)
A guy emailed me about a hand where he tried to give a false poker tell of strength (showing his neighbor his cards) to get a guy to fold to his all-in flop bet. He described himself as playing in a high-stakes home game. His email led to a discussion about how smart it is to try to influence your opponents in such a way. ...
Betting motion behaviors in limit
I've been playing a $15-30 limit game, with a little bit of $20-40, the last few days. I had a few hands I wanted to talk about that pertain to betting motion speed and tendencies. Now that my book has gone to the printers, I've been having a lot of second-guessing and doubting of the way I phrased some things in the book. This is bound to happen, and I try not to beat myself up too much, because ...
Poker tells in limit hold’em: A critique of my book by Philip Newall
I’ve been reading Philip Newall’s book The Intelligent Poker Player (published by TwoPlusTwo). His book is about game theory optimal strategy, and is especially applicable to short-handed and heads-up limit Hold’em. I plan on writing a review of it soon, but in the meantime I’ll just say that I recommend it. Not only does he talk about strategy, he also has really good advice on playing poker for ...
Loose hand movements associated with high hand strength
I wanted to add another note about Martin Staszko and his tells at the 2011 WSOP ME. One of the biggest hands he got was when he had A9 and got a full house on the turn (click for video link to start of hand). As I stated in the last post, I think he had a lot of physical looseness in this situation, and I think this was due to having such strong cards. I think the looseness/relaxation of his hand ...